This invention deals generally with crop conditioners and more specifically with a crop conditioner structure that uses interchangeable conditioning rollers.
Hay harvesting machines, commonly referred to as mower-conditioners or windrowers, utilize a crop harvesting header to sever the hay crop from the ground and convey it to a conditioning mechanism that operates to crush or crimp the severed crop material at intervals along the stem of the crop to facilitate the transpiration and evaporation of liquids from the crop material plant. Conditioning mechanisms that utilize a pair of counterrotating, intermeshing conditioning rolls to condition the severed crop material are well known and are described in early U.S. Pat. No. 3,488,929 issued to J. K. Hale.
However, such crop conditioners have traditionally been constructed to hold only one specific set of conditioning rollers. That is, machines have been constructed with no anticipation of changing the rollers except for merely replacing rollers with others of the same design and size, and even then any change of rollers has required major effort. The one concession made to interchangeability has been the use of more easily removable complete conditioner assemblies, but such assemblies, which are costly, have been used mostly for replacement purposes.
Yet it has become apparent over the years that different crops can be conditioned more satisfactorily with different combinations of conditioning roller designs, roll gap adjustment, and range of roll pressure adjustment.
It would be very beneficial to have crop conditioners that are more flexible and for which different rollers and roller pressures were easily available. However, different rollers and roller pressures require other structural changes in a conditioner assembly, particularly in the bearings used to support the rollers, which can not be performed in the field setting.